Records Of The Xiaoping Era @ MindSay

In the second year of the Hu Jintao reign, Wang Wanxing was released after having spent thirteen years in a psychiatric institution.  He was declared uncured and as having "delusions of grandeur, litigation mania and conspicuously enhanced pathological will," according to his medical report.  "His systematic delusions have shown no conspicuous improvement since he was first admitted to the hospital," stated the doctors at the Beijing Ankang.  Some words are worth more than others.  The handful of words he once held up cost more than a decade of answers from his physicians.

Its prosperity was built entirely on foreign skills, technology and investment.  All it provided was land for factories and a massive cache of underpaid labor.  When challenged by companies from developed countries, domestic enterprises were rarely competitive.  Its self-appointed representatives imposed a litany of restrictions to protect key industries from foreign forces, but proved unable to protect them from themselves.  Even the banks and the biggest utilities could only remain stable because of public subsidies.  In spite of their titles, managers and officials from the top to the bottom did not work for either their companies or for the government.  Now that it was becoming a fat animal, everyone wanted a piece of meat.  They spent their days refining their knives and cutting as much as they could for themselves.  The clumsy ones were sometimes punished.  The best cut so well their knives were always sharp, and no one noticed anything missing.  Many sections were already dead, but the animal did not know it yet.

A young man from the small town of Shouling heard that the residents of the rich city of Shenzhen had a special way of walking, so he went to investigate.  Entering the Special Economic Zone, he noticed trees, flowers, hedges and other shrubs planted neatly along many streets, as well as new office buildings, shopping malls, and large apartment complexes.  From the bus that he had ridden into the city, when he first saw them walking, the people seemed just like the ones from his village, only there were more of them.  Riding along a major thoroughfare, the man was startled by another bus coming from the other direction on the same side of the street.  The passengers did not even give it a glance as it passed.  Soon after, a small car made a right turn from its position near the median divider.  Drivers drifted left, then right, then left again, as they constantly jockeyed for an opportunity to skirt past one another.  Taxis passed traffic backups by driving on the sidewalk.  The painted lines, signs and lights on the street seemed to be nothing other than quaint decorations - an attractive pattern with which to offset a field of otherwise undifferentiated grey.  The bus on which the man sat waited while cars from three lanes simultaneously tried to turn left, again when another car parked in front of the bus while it was driving, and again at an intersection filled with vehicles coming from all directions.  When the young man finally tried to disembark, a crowd pressing to get on prevented him.  He had to shout to the driver that this was his stop after the doors closed.  Everyone seemed annoyed with him.  The sidewalk was under construction, leaving only enough room for two people walking in opposite directions to manage to pass one another.  Individuals always walked in the middle.  Pairs always walked side by side, never one in front of the other.  Upon encountering others walking the opposite way, someone always had to wait.  A number of times someone pushed past him, only to slow down, pause to talk on a mobile phone, or simply stop and look lost.  Where there was more room to walk, groups invariably spread out to fill any available space.  People stopped to talk on bridges and in underpasses, in front of entrances and exits, stairs and chairs, teller and ticket windows, in the middle of aisles and turnstiles, walkways and hallways.  Reaching the top of escalators, anyone carrying large boxes or other luggage would set them down and stand next to them on the textured metal plate while deciding what to do next.  When available, elevators were the preferred method to ascend or descend just one storey.  When entering a train, bus or other form of public transportation, anyone unable to see a free seat simply stopped in the doorway, eventually pressed ahead by the mass after them.  If they were able to see one, they dashed at it.  After leaving a bus, many crossed the street by running in front of it.  In a particularly busy area, where vendors selling fruit occupied most of the walkway, the young man stepped to the side to avoid a bunch of running schoolchildren, and was struck from behind by a bicycle, which bumped him into an oncoming car, fracturing bones in his ankles, feet and knees.  Unable to pay for medical expenses and unemployable, he was forced to crawl all the way home.

For over two thousand years, the Empire had determined walls to be more effective than education as a method to perpetuate its vision of a harmonious society.  The greatest of these walls was the Empire itself, built to separate those with power from the crowds around them.  Every time the Empire fell due to revolution or invasion, someone else put the wall back up.  Knowledge was official: rigorously tested and cyclicly revised to protect new rulers.  Education was simply a brick to open the door of officialdom, both a way to cross the wall and a way to maintain it.  Illiteracy kept most outside.  It took years to prepare what one was supposed to know.  Learning anything else brought no benefit.  No one asked why they had been told what to do.  They knew it was because they had to.  Their focus was on building a position from which they could ignore orders from others and give their own.  Every official was alert to the threat that others could take what he had gained away from him.  Along with their ruthless pursuit, tremendous efforts were undertaken to hide the assets amassed at public expense.  Education was necessary for the Empire to defend its legitimacy.  After a series of defeats and a cycle of decline culminating in the loss of imperial territory and authority to various foreign powers, it was recognized that certain techincal information had to be added to the official list.  In the interest of economic development, the extent and nature of the information on this list gradually expanded, but the walls themselves remained the same.  The fundamental purpose of the media was to direct public opinion, not be subject to it.  Schools, newspapers, television, radio, bbs, blogs and other websites were encouraged to be creative, but could not deviate from official restrictions.  Web entries on sensitive subjects disappeared, only to be reposted in multiple other locations.  Sources contradicting official knowledge were constantly blocked, but there were many ways to get to them.  Wireless telecommunications connected too many millions for every sms message or conversation to be monitored.  Red banners hung by the government displaying exhortations for appropriate thought and conduct were ignored as completely as the dirt in the street.  Partitions filled the middle and lined the sides of roadways to compel pedestrians to appropriate crossing points.  Women in high heels and men in bedclothes lifted one leg, then the other, to cross where they wanted.

We create names to keep meaning.  Everything we recognize, we understand as a narrative: an open doorway, a line of laundry, beige, pink, pale gray, an overturned washbasin, a stained wooden table sitting in a green field, a soft breeze, white plastic bottlecaps, an electric fan standing on a chair before an enormous heap of brick and concrete pieces, a toothbrush covered in mud, the erratic fractured angles of broken wooden beams, the inner walls of the upstairs rooms, the light coming into the building, a passing insect, a woman clears her throat, bodies float in the river.